State dream acts and education, health and mental health of Mexican young adults in the U.S.

We investigate the education, health and mental health effects of state policies that allowed or explicitly banned tuition subsidy and financial aid to undocumented college students using the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for 1998-2013. Our analysis suggests that an explicit ban on tuition subsidy or enrollment in public colleges lowered college education of non-citizen Mexican young adults by 5.4-11.6 percentage points. We find some evidence that in-state tuition and access to financial aid improved self-reported health and reduced mental health distress, and ban on in-state-tuition/enrollment increased mental health distress among non-citizen Mexican young adults: estimated effects are generally significant in first-difference models and models that include state-specific cubic trends, and often insignificant in difference-in-difference models.